Jung and Educational Theory

Inna Semetsky, Inna Semetsky

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118297322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Jung and Educational Theory offers a new take on Jung's work, providing original, rich and informative material on his impact on educational research.

• Explores Jung's writing from the standpoint of educational philosophy, assessing what it has to offer to theories of education
• Highlights Jung's emphasis on education's role in bringing up integrated and ethical human beings
• Offers the perspectives of a diversity of academics and practitioners, on topics ranging from the role of the unconscious in learning to the polytheistic classroom
• Both a valuable addition to the academic library and a significant new resource in the professional development of teachers

1

Jung and the Soul of Education (at the ‘Crunch’)

Susan Rowland

The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centred in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration, to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.

(Stanley Fish, ‘The Last Professor’—Stanley Fish Blog—NYTimes.com)

[T]he actual act of teaching, something I’ve been doing for more than 50 years now, has not changed at all. In spite of all he new technology the most useful teaching device is still … a log, with a teacher at one end and a student at the other end.

(Tony Steblay in reply to Stanley Fish on the same blog)

They appear suddenly by the side of the truly modern man as uprooted human beings, bloodsucking ghosts, whose emptiness is taken for the unenviable loneliness of the modern man and casts discredit upon him.

(C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933, p. 228.)

Introduction: Education and Controversy

Writing in 2009, at a time of global anxiety and as a university teacher, the world of education appears fraught with universal concerns and to be undergoing its own identity crisis. In the blog quoted above, eminent US English literature professor Stanley Fish associates two major developments in university education. Here the move to a mass model, in which higher education becomes the expectation of more than one third of the population, is inevitably accompanied by the triumph of utilitarianism. Degree education of the masses becomes primarily a means to acquire skills for employment. The corollary at institutional level is that universities are characterized as profit-making institutions. Education is a business. The values of ‘useless’ study of the humanities are as quickly forgotten as their provision is being eroded.

So the accusation here is of a tragic narrowing of what education means. At the same time, the world faces related crises of climate change and economic meltdown. Indeed, as Robert Romanyshyn pointed out in his many works, we had better pay attention to the coding of our metaphors in which polar ice melting suggests more than affinity to capitalist meltdown, itself a metaphor often used for nuclear catastrophe. When trying to address the potential catastrophe of nature, routinely there are calls for a revolution in education. By ‘education’ here, what is referred to is the school system and not the activity in its widest sense.

How can we possibly connect a workplace changing fast via technology and saturated with notions of utility and profit with calls for a new kind of human being? Is education suffering from an overload of social demand and fantasy? From the fantasy that it can save the world while becoming a profitable new industry to replace dying forms of manufacturing? There is a dangerous gulf between ‘education’ as a locus of fantasies of salvation and what Fish rightly points out is its growing mechanisation and standardisation. Nor is a shift from institutions devoted to learning, to profitable businesses, confined to universities. In Britain in the 1980s, the imposition of a National Curriculum in schools, which significantly homogenised lesson content, was accompanied by the requirement to balance budgets. Schools, for the first time, began to hire managers or accountants.

This article will use the work of C. G. Jung to look at these tensions in education, from the demand that it be part of some kind of social salvation, to the possibilities being explored by Jungians in the classroom today. In particular, the theory and practice of education challenges imagined social boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the institutions and even between inside the self and outside, in cultural creativity. With Jung’s help, one might take this sense of provisional or liminal boundaries further and look at education inside the sphere of human existence and also beyond it. Where is education in relation to nature, matter and the non-human?

Jung on Education and Bloodsucking Ghosts

In an article of 1928, ‘The Significance of the Unconscious in Individual Education’, Jung divides education into three types (Jung, 1954, CW17, p. 149): by example; by norms or rules (collective education); and, significantly, individuation which means coming to terms with one’s unconscious. Here Jung is on his core ground. For his ideas are based upon the supreme importance of the unconscious as a source of creativity, and as at least partly, unknowable. All his key notions follow from this initial proposition. Most significantly, this hypothesis of the unconscious renders all other knowledge and argument provisional. To Jung, the assertion of something, anything, as absolute truth is a dangerous fantasy of the ego.

To Jung, subjectivity was a continual process of the ego being challenged, undermined, and remade by the richer creativity of the unconscious. This was ‘individuation’. Crucially, he used the metaphor of ‘education’ as part of a framework of understanding how therapy might aid individuation. While stressing the provisional nature of his findings, and the arbitrary quality of the portrayal of his psychology, he says:

Be that as it may, I venture to arrange the sum-total of findings under the four heads of confession, explanation, education and transformation.

(Jung, 1933, p. 35)

Interestingly, this account of his own methods of psychotherapy deliberately draws upon two social histories, that of religion, specifically confession to a priest, and that of education, presumably of a more individual type. Here, psychotherapy raids collective forms of discourse to set up another collective, the ‘rules’ of the analytic encounter, in which something very individual is hoped to occur: the individuation of the patient.

Two points could be drawn from this analysis by Jung. One is that ‘education’ is viewed here as a stage on route toward ‘transformation’, not as an end in itself. The other point is that, despite Jung’s apparent focus upon the individual, collective considerations are innate to his individuation. Of the ‘education’ stage he says: ‘[t]he problem which now faces the patient is that of being educated as a social being’ (ibid. p.49).

To Jung, the further into the psyche one delves, the more ‘collective’, and hence ‘social’, the implications. In suggesting that humans are born with the propensity for certain sorts of images and meanings (archetypes), he theorises a ‘collective unconscious’. Cultural life is made up of incarnations of archetypal images. These are energised by the collective inheritance of archetypes, while being coloured by individual and social histories. Jung’s psyche is both collective and cultural: it is most profoundly innately creative and partly mysterious. Hence, to him education means coming to terms with one’s unconscious in a social context. After all, the unconscious is not only to be found within in dreams. It is also, disconcertingly, to be found projected on to other people, to ideas and ideologies, and social institutions. In fact, the unconscious Other may reach out to us even as the face of nature and the cosmos. In this belief in the projection of a psychic inside to the outside by the independently creative unconscious, Jung appears to have stuck to modernity’s paradigm of a division between subject and object, self and world. However, in looking back at the Renaissance discourse of alchemy, and in forming his own ideas about the psyche and material world co-creating meaning (synchronicity), he anticipated new holism. Within holistic educational process, the educator is herself changed.

So who are the bloodsucking ghosts that haunt modernity? They are un-individuated, and therefore, un-educated people. Their un-self-conscious modern existence does not permit them to be remade by the unconscious, and thus they become cut off from it. The more one is cut off from the unconscious, the more one fears it. The greater the fear, the blacker and more powerful the unconscious becomes. Because Jung thinks collectively as well as personally, what is on the individual level someone who has no life of their own, who merely leeches off others, e.g. a bloodsucking ghost, is on a societal level the creator of a terrifyingly material unconscious other. Jung argued that a society not educated to the nature of the unconscious, one that believes only in the reality of matter, creates its own material ‘shadow’. Such a shadow, he believed, had become actual substance in weapons of mass destruction.

[M]an has never yet been able single-handed to hold his own against the powers of darkness—that is, the unconscious … The World War was such an irruption …

(Jung, 1933, p. 277)

Hence, in Jung’s own cultural institution of Jungian psychoanalysis, and also in his psychology, there is a suggestive fluidity or ‘deconstruction’ of absolute divisions between ‘self’ and ‘world’, ‘individual’ and ‘collective’, and even ‘education of the soul’ and ‘education of society’. The education of the soul is inevitably involved with the collective, as unconscious dreams and fantasies direct the analytic work into the patient’s humanity in a larger sense. For Jung, individuation is healing because Jung believed the psyche was a self-healing entity in which individuation became a drive to ever-greater psychic wholeness. Indeed, he called this wholeness union with, or intimation of, the self. Here self is not ego with a fantasy of separateness from the world; it is self as ever-deeper connectedness to the collective unconscious and the reality of humanity, society and cosmos. Ultimately, Jung is not facilely abolishing the modern individual. He is rather re-situating the human being as only fully herself when acknowledging and articulating deep relations to the unconscious psyche, human culture and nature.

What is necessary is not to smash the ego, for that would destroy consciousness and the result would be psychosis on either a personal or mass level. This is precisely what Jung designed his psychology to avoid. He regarded the disaster of Nazi Germany as the result of too little consciousness in the German collective life. Such dire results were caused by too little individuation on a personal and social level. Individuation produces consciousness. Jung’s unconscious is a monster if ignored or ill-treated by repression. It is a nurturing (M)other if individuation proceeds as an education in responding to the psyche’s creative potential. The consciousness produced by successful individuation is strong enough to work productively with the unconscious as a junior partner. This conscious ego is able to receive its profound fertility in ways that enhance the individual and her world.

Crucially, Jung saw this potential for education and transformation in the individual as simultaneously individual and collective. Societies, like individuals, fail or succeed in individuation. Indeed, Jung’s interest in the arts pivots upon his perception that the whole socially-located artistic process is a form of collective individuation. He argued that art could be categorised as either ‘psychological’ or ‘visionary’. Like many of his so-called ‘opposites’, these terms represent poles of a spectrum rather than discrete types. ‘Psychological’ stands for art where the artist has consciously worked upon a social problem. Here art is an overt expressive communication of aesthetic and cultural values drawn from the collective consciousness, the known social consensus.

By contrast, ‘visionary’ art is deeply evoked by the collective unconscious. It appears to the initial audience as strange, wonderful, shocking, sublime, daemonic or terrifying. Visionary art is hard to ‘read’, impossible to comprehend, for it calls to its audience for images, voices, intimations, dreams and nightmares that have been lost, forgotten, suppressed or not yet witnessed. Visionary art may be a prediction of social changes to come, or may excavate ancient forms of humanity. What it definitely brings to its culture is the ‘other’. It is a form by which the collective unconscious speaks to human beings as individuals, and also collectively as a society. In effect, visionary art produces its audience, and at the same time is profoundly individual and deeply connected to the social world. For it releases what is powerfully collective, and causes us to know our individuality as liminal as well as precious.

The Educated Soul and Nature: Robert Romanyshyn and Jerome Bernstein

Jung’s vision of the educated soul is not confined to the human world. He was fascinated by the borderlands of the psyche. Two post-Jungian theorists have developed what he left largely implicit in his work. Robert Romanyshyn, in publications stemming from his first book, Technology as Symptom and Dream (1989), and Jerome Bernstein, in Living in the Borderland (2005), both do vital work by looking at the psyche in nature.

Romanyshyn, in particular, explores alchemy, a historical practice that fascinated Jung. He pushes Jung’s alchemical studies further by exploring alchemy in relation to metaphor. Alchemy is popularly understood as the doomed pursuit of turning lead into gold in the Renaissance. More precisely, alchemy is a holistic vision of an educating and transforming practice. For alchemists believed that the material world was inspirited and inspired. Far from God being separate from matter, ‘he’ was trapped in matter and needed to be freed by complex processes centring on coagulation and solution, solidifying and dissolving. Yet the repeated solve et coagula could not be reduced to a purely material process, because the world is not sundered like this. Rather, the alchemist’s own soul was involved through philosophical study and poetic meditation upon symbols. Alchemy also sought to bring together feminine and masculine through a ‘chymical wedding’ of sun and moon.

What is of contemporary significance in this cultural practice, Romanyshyn argues, is the way alchemists believe in the creative linking of psyche, written text, material substance and nature or cosmos. For alchemists, their worldly practice with flasks and test-tubes, etc. (in which they became the precursors of modern chemistry), was a dynamic part of work with the psyche that was itself a marriage of intellect and love, Logos and Eros. Alchemists united parts of human activity that modernity has since divorced, to form divisions such as artistic creativity and science or mathematics, feeling versus rationality, and mind activity with body activity, and psyche as separate from matter. In so doing, alchemists situated humanity in a cosmic web. They saw their work as connecting the human soul to the nature of plants and animals, and the stars. Drawing astrology and magic into their philosophy, they produced a sort of prototype psychology.

Romanyshyn’s work explores the potential of what Jung began to intimate about alchemy as a re-visioning of human beings as embedded in nature, rather than as claiming to be of an order ‘above’ nature as well as a transcendent God who inaugurated dualism, in creating Nature and Man as separate from his own Being. Dualism inevitably manifests culturally as hierarchy, with the founding Father’s masculine superiority separate from the ‘other’, or feminine. Nature too is cut off from the sacred, dis-animated, feminised, and made ‘other’ to human culture, and even, at times, so repressed as to be the abode of the Jungian shadow, the harbour of demons.

In this parlous antecedent of our present condition of having exploited nature to our own detriment, alchemy represents the survival of a philosophy even older than monotheism. This is known as ‘animism’, the idea that nature is full of articulate spirits that in certain circumstances are able to communicate with humans. Characteristic of the pre-Christian Celts in Northern Europe, animistic religions are to be found within cultures that have sophisticated ways of caring for and, in turn, being nurtured by, what Westerners symptomatically call, ‘natural resources’.

For those who argue that in order to survive and prevent the worst of global warming, we need to totally re-orient the attitudes of Western people by education, it is this fundamental shift from a monotheistic to animistic approach to nature that they mean. It does not necessarily entail the abolition of the three great monotheisms of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, for all three have currents within them capable of renouncing t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issue Book Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Jung and Holistic Education
• 1 Jung and the Soul of Education (at the ‘Crunch’)
• 2 On the ‘Art and Science’ of Personal Transformation: Some critical reflections
• 3 The Polytheistic Classroom
• 4 Itinerary of the Knower: Mapping the ways of gnosis, Sophia, and imaginative education
• 5 The Unifying Function of Affect: Founding a theory of psychocultural development in the epistemology of John Dewey and Carl Jung
• 6 Deleuze’s Philosophy and Jung’s Psychology: Learning and the Unconscious
• 7 ‘The Other Half’ of Education: Unconscious education of children
• 8 Complex Education: Depth psychology as a mode of ethical pedagogy
• 9 Jung and Tarot: A theory-practice nexus in education and counselling
• Index